A dapper maverick

Daniel Burt

THE abundance of whodunits on TV is testament to humanity's endless appetite for cruelty. Who knew there were so many backstories to bestow upon an interchangeable corpse? Right now, somewhere in the world, viewers are settling in for a new incarnation of gore and intrigue.

And who can blame them? Whatever your day's problems, none are likely to be as insurmountable as being murdered, and even fewer are prone to be solved so neatly in a commercial hour. My parents think nothing of watching several detective shows in one night, pausing only to tussle over who prepares the next cup of tea. Anthropologists attest to the fact that nothing relaxes the mind quite like a dose of homicide before bed.

One of the more frequently portrayed detectives is Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's eccentric, emotionally distant know-all who has persisted in popular culture since 1887. The version in Elementary lives in modern-day Brooklyn, pays prostitutes to suspend him with handcuffs, hypnotises himself to stave off boredom, watches six TVs simultaneously and memorises the dialogue, escaped rehab on the day of his release and is played by Jonny Lee Miller, a sleeve-tattooed Brit on the shortlist of men cool enough to have once divorced Angelina Jolie. Living with former surgeon and ''sober companion'' Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) ensures that Elementary has enough points of difference from the BBC's Sherlock to keep the copyright-infringement vultures at bay.

The elevation of science to god status has led to detective work ballooning to accommodate all manner of crime-fighting wonks. You can't swing a candlestick in the library without hitting a forensic archaeologist, ballistics analyst, medical toxicologist, blood-spatter expert or garden-variety lab geek. Even police sniffer dogs have to major in olfactory perception at puppy school.

These revolutions have hurt Holmes, whose logical reasoning was unquestioned in the 20th century, but who must now wait to have his hunches verified by CCTV footage and DNA tests. ''Your ME [medical examiner] will come to the same conclusion in a couple of hours. I'm delivering it now,'' he says, his deductive genius reduced to a party trick.

Holmes doesn't have to specialise or play by the rules, because he's not on the payroll. He is a dapper maverick, a Renaissance man, a job description you sadly won't find in the career section of your newspaper. He is one of fiction's original ''consulting detectives'', a now-popular career for TV characters who pinpoint clues beyond the grasp of meat-and-potatoes detectives.

These CIA psychics, micro-expression interpreters and best-selling crime novelists never seem to be called after traditional lines of inquiry have been exhausted, but rather arrive at the crime scene while the bodies are still warm. Even Dexter, the humble blood guy for Miami Metro, generously undertakes pro bono detective work in order to secretly mutilate baddies and dump their bodies out at sea.

What would the real detectives do without these renegades? A few episodes in, and the NYPD seems utterly dependent on Sherlock. At least Gotham City pretended to make an effort before firing up the bat signal.